I'm surfing at work on a Pentium II grey box with built in video and audio, with 128 megabytes of RAM, running Windows 98. I can do anything my home box can do, except burn CD's. It works. Current PCs are WAY, WAAAAAYYYY overpowered for office and internet applications. What an office box needs can be wedged into a form factor the size of a pack of cigarettes.
You don't "own" content. You have a copyright, that's it. Copyright is not ownership. It's a way of interfering with people making copies without your permission.
You don't own a song, a movie, a story, an image. Those are the property, if that is the word for it, of all mankind as long as people want to keep it alive. It doesn't work any other way, and chanting magical semantic manipulation still won't make it a physical object.
And the contract we created with our constitution between limited time copyrights and the public good was unilaterally destroyed by the copyright maniacs when they made the terms eternal. There is no contract; they didn't want one. So we copy what we like now.
If they don't like it, they can restore the contract. And stop pretending that art is property.
"Recent pronouncements from the Bush Administration and national security initiatives put in place in the Reagan era could see internment camps and martial law in the United States." -- The Sydney Morning Herald, July 27, 2002
In 1984, the Rex-84 readiness exercise program was conducted by 34 federal departments and agencies, reportedly as an exercise to handle an influx of illegal aliens crossing the Mexican/U.S. border. Brought to Americans' attention during the Iran-contra hearings, the exercise, which was conducted alongside another drill, "Night Train 84," also tested military readiness to round up and detain citizens in case of massive civil unrest.
None of that ever happened, of course, and in many respects, it seems silly to even mention it. After all, other Reagan-era initiatives, like the Armageddon exercises Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld participated in, are far more interesting. Then, too, despite a brief moment of sunlight in the 1970s (when Congress, according to former President and CIA director George H.W. Bush, "unleashed a bunch of untutored little jerks out there"), emergency detention plans had been in place since the 1950s, without incident. Americans have not been herded into camps since World War II, so why worry about it now?
For some, the answer comes in the form of yet another government contract awarded to Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root to build "temporary detention facilities" in case of an "immigration emergency." Reminiscent of Rex 84, which was conducted on the premise of preparing for "an influx of immigrants," there is reason to believe that hoards of poor, tired immigrants are not the true concern. As Tom Hennessy of the Press-Telegram recently pointed out, "there already are thousands of beds in place at various U.S. locations for the purpose of housing illegal immigrants." So what else might these centers be used for?
Given predictions that another terror attack is all but certain, it seems far more likely that the centers would be used for post-911-type detentions of immigrants rather than a sudden deluge. "Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," Daniel Ellsberg remarked. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo." As it turns out, immigrants aren't the only concern. As a news brief in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root. KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department in case of an unexpected influx of immigrants or to house people after a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space, the company said.
Hurricane Katrina gave Americans a glimpse of how a natural disaster scenario might play out. John Brinkerhoff, one of the FEMA officials behind the Reagan-era martial law and internment directives who "planned for the detention of at least 21 million American Negroes in assembly centers or relocation camps" began defending the Pentagon's desire to deploy troops on American streets in 2002, and sure enough, after Hurricane Katrina, Blackwater mercenaries were brought in to police the streets of New Orleans -- as soldiers were instructed to "shoot to kill" looters. Brinkerhoff also told PBS that, "The United States itself is now for the first time since the War of 1812 a theater of war. That means that we should apply, in my view, the same kind of command structure in the United States that we apply in other theaters of war."
Which brings us to the KBR spokesman's final statement regarding
How old? I wanna know if I'm closer to Depends usage than you are. What's the cutoff age for taking daytime classes in college, I mean, the age they call security if they catch you talking to a female student?
I've been watching the digital video scene since 1984. I've watched the dogttraining of the consumer the whole time; the redefinition of "copyright" as "property", the elimination of the free analog 1080i hidef TV signal and the new reign of metered digital "content" protected by hardware. The destruction of the national news networks to be replaced by corporate for-profit newsertainment. The balkanization of the national consciousness by way too many bad voices. TV won't be about education and the old raising of the spirit dreamed of by the PBS network. More like the 19th century than the 21st.
Here's the simple answer about the graphics cards: Hollywood doesn't want PC's to run DVD's. They aren't in a hurry to sync up the hardware. They want "content" (the recording you bought belongs to them, forever) output to hardware they license, which will be multi-thousand dollar entertaiment centers. They know prices will drop, but they also know tech will improve and 4K scan content will eventually be marketable, and so on forever. They want a piece of each new lump of money from hardware, and they want a steady stream of cash from IPTV "rentals".
They want a structure that can respond to rapid technological change by rewriting the rules about who owns the video/audio -- the consumer or them. No matter what changes, even direct video to the optical nerve and audio to a cochlear implant, they want a legal structure that says they own what enters your brain.
They aren't paying attention to PCs 'cause they want the damned things to just go away.
Me? I'm running Windows 2000 SP4 on a NON-DRMed box, and have a nice stack of mobos and other parts that run video just fine without their f-ing approval. I don't have to check in with MS to obtain permission to run my PC. Linux is an option, but I'm fairly sure they'll sue anyone into oblivion who reverse engineers DRM for Linux boxen.
I can see their undoing on the horizon. Eventually we'll be able to fabricate our own PC hardware, on our own mini factory machines. We'll make what we like -- unless they outlaw that as well. I assume they will, but I have hope.
In the very end, we really don't need videogames and hidef video to live a good life.
oh yeah, one other point. Bush has been wiretapping and spying without warrants on EVERYONE for the last couple of years. He claimed at first to be following the FISA laws, then changed his story and then claimed that getting the rubberstamp warrant was too much trouble -- consistently lying in fact, because he doesn't need a warrant immediately. He can retroactively obtain one up to 72 hours after the spying begins.
His new justification? He doesn't have to follow any laws. As CinC, he IS the law.
Let's break it down. He can get warrants after the fact, basically a paperwork operation. He doesn't want to. Why? No warrants mean NO RECORDS OF WHO HE IS SPYING ON. If he had to go to the FISA courts, there'd be a record that could be perused ten years or more down the road. He doesn't want a record.
He's spying on his "enemies". That'd be Michael Moore, the ACLU, DailyKos, select reporters, all the others. We know for a FACT that Bolton, now ambassador to the U.N., was running the spy operation via the NSA listening in on the US National Security Council members in the time leading up to the Iraq invasion in order to get a fix on their efforts to hinder their plans. If they can justify that, they have no problem in spying on their opponents, and they must logically be spying right now.
They probably don't want to run their spy targets past the FISA judges because the judges would see the pattern and deny them the warrants.
Also, unverified news back up by observation: there's blackmail going on. Broad observation: why are key congressmen so bloody quiet under this extreme provocation? Why are news organisations so cowed?
I've heard som grim indications that Rove and company are using this goldmine of info to shut people up. Think about it. Every email you've sent in the clear. Every website, even "Russian schoolgirls in rubber suits", Congressman John Smith and his staff have visited, every phone sex number called, every escort service phone call, all the mistresses -- this, baby, is Total Information Awareness. They can nuke anyone from Internet orbit. Bush famously said he doesn't use email because he doesn't want people to read "his stuff". Duh.
"An example of this is NASA's James Hansen. He speaks out directly to the public and is mobbed by his peers as a result. More power to him."
His peers DID NOT MOB HIM. Bush's fundamentalist political appointees are suppressing scientists all over the spectrum (as you know, of course). On global warming, reproduction, evolutionary biology, space science. Fundamentalist overseers and corporate lobbyists are running the show at all the agencies.
His peers have more to lose than Hansen does. Everyone is just waiting for the Democrats to take back the government so they can breath again.
How do you stop? You turn around, and decelerate at one g for the same amount of time you accelerated. You don't even have to cut the engine and precess the ship; you could skew flip. The ship simply adds a lateral acceleration, and slowly "turns" until the ship is pointing backwards, blasting at one g, decelerating. You have to take the billions-of-miles "loop" into account navigating, but that problem is trivial compared to hitting a hundred-million arrival mile window at 4.75+ light years.
Well, the problem this individual is claiming to address is one that only people who really think about high speed travel come across. Popular "Sci-Fi" doesn't address the problem, so most people haven't even heard about it. It's the interstellar medium. SF proper has discussed it for over sixty years.
(To be fair, sci-fi on TV addressed it once, but only on paper for uber-geeks: the "navigational deflectors" of Roddenberry's starships existed to kick the junk out of their way at sub-c speeds.)
The problem is kinetic energy released when a high speed ship hits something, even an atom. The interstellar medium consists of all the free-floating matter between the stars. The IM holds hundreds to millions of particles per cubic meter. Say the ship is a pencil shape, with a bow area presented of say 2000 sq meters. I'll let people with more time calculate how many particles, from atoms to grains of whatever, the ship will hit per second. Let's just say the energy released would be entertaining to the ghosts of the crew. Of course the ship would hit the IM all the time, from takeoff speeds to top speed, so the problem would be noticed early on in the voyage.
And that's the tiny problem. The big one is REAL objects, from grains of sand to entire planetlets that may exist in the flight cyclinder in front of the ship, sextillions of miles of them. POOF. Plasma. No time to dodge, not at those speeds. And the ship might be required to dodge thousands of times a second. Not good.
For more fun, think of what happens to the wavelengths of the radiation the ship plows through at those speeds as well. Doppler shifts, big ones. We're talking super-high frequency x-ray, enough to melt the metal the ship is made of, I'd guess off my butt. More than enough in any case to kill the crew.
"Christian" is Fundyspeak for "Southern Baptist Conference, Fundamentalist/Literalist, Born-Again, anti-abortion". Methodists might conceivably make the grade, but occasionally backslide into the pit of Satanism that all the other false Christians occupy. Catholics are of course not Christian, but rarely is it said out loud.
"Who the hell's going to argue with that? Seriously?Who the hell's going to argue with that? Seriously?"
Me.
I guess I'm unusual.
Terry Pratchett once observed that cows are herded by men that, if the cows every thought about it, the cows could convert into a damp smear on the ground in two seconds.
But the cows never think about it. They are cows. Rebellion never crosses their minds, so they let the pink monkeys herd them into slaughterhouses.
(plaitive tone) why are we all cows? people died for over a hundred years to create unions so that employers couldn't treat people like peons on a feudal estate. Why do you hate yourselves so much?
You have to love it, Canadian person. Look at the postings on this page; they are siding WITH THE MAYOR against one of their own. That's where our unions are.
I've been immersed in this culture my whole life, and it takes a short shock of outside air to look at it anew. We've a country that hates "socialism" so much that they organize to keep inions OUT of their workplace. The salaries shrink, pensions disppear, healthcare is repeatedly slashed for current employees and denied to new, "temporary" employees who never will become permanent. And they will side with the employers every time.
There's a book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?", which, altho not really being about Kansas, addresses this all-pervasive phenomenon here in the south. Wage slaves vote against their own interests, and those of the families, because of their distaste of "socialism" and "big government".
It's a waterfall to the bottom of the gorge. The center ain't holding, and we're all being flushed, except for the very tippy top of the social scale, which is swimming in money and will pretty much own everything.
Got any room up there for expats? I'm thinking WAY up north, given the warming to come. A place without cameras on every street, a scenario the Mayor of Chicago is bringing to fruition. Our new transit passes will track our movements, we're to be watched at all times, they're reading our email and listening to our phones down here. I didn't waste all that time growing up to live in a prison populated by cowards overseen by the paranoid and greedy.
Every point I made has come out of the news services in the last few weeks. "Michael Moore" didn't tell me this; Halliburton.com told me about the camps, and AP and the newspapers told me the rest. Abu Graib cost 8 million. How many camps are they building with 347 million??
The feeding chairs were in today's news. The prison officials are quite proud of their accomplishment. They seem to really like tying up naked men. Those men are simply trying to die to leave hell. They are being tortured, every day they are in a cage. We've let thousands free from these camps, uncharged, since they hadn't done anything. Fairly good bet we're hosing down innocent men. We've killed about 32 during their various tortures, didja know? It was in the news. Google is your friend. That's the number the military admits to torturing to death.
All you have to do is read. But you don't, do ya. Ya get your news from Limbaugh and the new, "culture-changed" CNN, and of course Fox News and the others.
this isn't "liberalism", this is about morality and truth. It's about not torturing innocent people, about concentration camps being built while CBS and NBC and CNN and Fox don't give a damn.
You are aware that Haliburton recently landed a 347 million dollar contract to build new "emergency detention" facilities in the continental U.S.? They're building prison camps for tens or hundreds of thousands of people. The reason given is "immigration emergencies", or disaster housing.
I don't know exactly how to pound the point home any harder, but they are preparing for national upheaval. They are building concentration camps, my friend, and if anyone tries rebellion they are going to become permanent residents. You're presenting a false choice, letting rebels live or killing them. They've plans to lock them up en masse. Bush already has defacto power to strip citizenship and human rights away at will; locking protestors or armed rebels into Kellogg Root and Brown maintained mass prison camps wouldn't stonker them at all. In case ya'll haven't noticed, crossing SS designated boundaries around public events (I interpret this as leaving the "1st Amendment Zone") is now a federal felony subjecting the criminal to arrest -- by the Secret Service. As a terrorist, essentially.
This isn't a new plan, either. Reagan's people had a contingency plan set up to mass arrest and imprison dissenters back in '84. Our boy Oliver North had a huge hand in the plan. It's amazing how the same names keep popping up.
they have taken on vast unconstitutional powers to capture terrorists. Now, the next step is to redefine "terrorist". They've already designated PETA a terrorist organisation. Peace groups have been infiltrated and monitored since 2001 -- as terrorists, of course. Bush has linked criticism and terrorism already. His posse obviously is following a plan which ends with their party enabled to imprison dissenters without trial, subject to torture at will, or even death. Didja hear Guantanamo has a execution station now?
You can't get near the President anymore unless you sign a loyalty oath and are vetted by the SS for Republicanism. Show up with a sign or a T-Shirt with something to say and you are out, or under arrest. And despite what you might think,the cops are all on board with the President. I saw what happened in Chicago back in 2003. The cops are hard-core Republicans. Same with the military brass (not so much the rank and file). Someone once refered to the Army as the armed forces of the Republican party.
In other news, hunger strikes have nearly disappeared at Guantanamo Bay after they've strapped the hunger strike non-people into "feeding chairs", forced food down tubes, and physically prevented the tortured from throwing up the food. Afterwards they locked them into "cold cells" for punishment. I can only assume they're using the cold water hoses in the 50 degree concrete cells again, to get those prisoners nice and hypothermic and quiet.
I don't feel very ironic anymore. This is very dangerous. they are totally out of control, and there is no mass media that anyone trusts anymore, since news was turned into a "business" instead of a loss leader to keep a broadcast license, to tell us what's happening. We have to read overseas press to find out what's going on in our own country.
Well, you could try being careful, not letting sharp objects touch the screen? Is it their failure if people are absentminded klutzes? How d'ya make a scratchproof video screen, exactly? If you keep rubbing your car key on your plasma display, do ya complain to Toshiba about those ugly scratches?
False choices. Let's go with the unstated third choice: use some of that 90 billion dollars sitting in the bank to rewrite the OS and fix the damned problems, so we no longer need this "fix". OS-X and the various Unixes seem to be working without monthly repair contracts, and Unix itself is older than Windows by far. Microsoft could fix the code -- if it wanted to. They apparently don't want to. This repair contract they are offering is worth even more tens of billions of dollars permanently flowing into their coffers.
More like a restaurant slipping you arsenic with your meal, then selling you the antidote as an add-on dessert as you lay dying on the tiled floor. A MONTHLY antidote, no less, at an ever-increasing price.
90 billion, and growing fast. You'd think they could spend some of that and fix their code. But, Vista seems to be a Mac-ified XP. Why fix what's making them even more money? They sell the problem AND the fix. You buy the OS, then pay for a monthly repair contract on the unwarrantied junk they sold you.
Bart's second law: Any time a person or entity makes a "mistake" that puts extra money (or power) in their pocket, expect them to make that "mistake" again and again and again.
Have you ever calculated what we in the U.S. have actually paid for internet access in the last twenty years? I don't mean "per month". I mean, draw back, and think.
Let's go for this year. Lemme see. Guess 20 million, figure from nowhere, with broadband. Just at home. Costs 45 a month on average. 45 X 12. 540 a year, for 20 million homes. 10,800,000,000 a year. Just one year. And it's probably a lot higher; please bear with me here. I'm just making a point.
Ten billion, eleven billion. How much for the last twenty, in toto, business and residential, have we paid? Twenty? Thirty? Forty billion bucks? Keep the idea of the magnitude in mind as I add tens of billions in free money granted by federal and state and municipal governments, in tax breaks, in granted monopoly access to customers, in deregulation calulated to permit the telcos to bring fiber to the door.
HOW MUCH HAVE THEY SUCKED US FOR? A hundred billion? How about the lost opportunity costs because we've crap bandwidth for maximum profit?
And now we'll have two-three companies left after all the merging, in an easy-to-maintain price fixing circle.
Let's call it a hundred billion they've charged, with much more to come. And we've got what for connections? For how much each? How much will it take to pound home the point that the way we've gone about it has failed our people, our economy?
It would have been cheaper for the Federal government to have laid fiber to the home in an Apollo type project over the last 20 years. Private businesses are too fast, too well financed, for any sort of meaningful regulation. They pull simple stunts like placing their best lobbyist, Powell, at the head of the FCC under Bush, where he granted them their wettest wishes. He'll of course go back to work for them after he's done and become a squillionaire for his loyal efforts.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surfing at work on a Pentium II grey box with built in video and audio, with 128 megabytes of RAM, running Windows 98. I can do anything my home box can do, except burn CD's. It works. Current PCs are WAY, WAAAAAYYYY overpowered for office and internet applications. What an office box needs can be wedged into a form factor the size of a pack of cigarettes.
You don't "own" content. You have a copyright, that's it. Copyright is not ownership. It's a way of interfering with people making copies without your permission.
You don't own a song, a movie, a story, an image. Those are the property, if that is the word for it, of all mankind as long as people want to keep it alive. It doesn't work any other way, and chanting magical semantic manipulation still won't make it a physical object.
And the contract we created with our constitution between limited time copyrights and the public good was unilaterally destroyed by the copyright maniacs when they made the terms eternal. There is no contract; they didn't want one. So we copy what we like now.
If they don't like it, they can restore the contract. And stop pretending that art is property.
According to Terry Pratchett's take on quantum, the number of possible kitty states are three:
1. Alive
2. Dead
3. Bloody angry after being shut up in a damned box. Opening the box akin to stepping on a claymore mine.
Synthetic spider silk weave, I believe. And sintered aerogel.
http://buzzflash.com/farrell/06/02/far06003.html
Detention Camp Jitters
by Maureen Farrell
"Recent pronouncements from the Bush Administration and national security initiatives put in place in the Reagan era could see internment camps and martial law in the United States."
-- The Sydney Morning Herald, July 27, 2002
In 1984, the Rex-84 readiness exercise program was conducted by 34 federal departments and agencies, reportedly as an exercise to handle an influx of illegal aliens crossing the Mexican/U.S. border. Brought to Americans' attention during the Iran-contra hearings, the exercise, which was conducted alongside another drill, "Night Train 84," also tested military readiness to round up and detain citizens in case of massive civil unrest.
None of that ever happened, of course, and in many respects, it seems silly to even mention it. After all, other Reagan-era initiatives, like the Armageddon exercises Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld participated in, are far more interesting. Then, too, despite a brief moment of sunlight in the 1970s (when Congress, according to former President and CIA director George H.W. Bush, "unleashed a bunch of untutored little jerks out there"), emergency detention plans had been in place since the 1950s, without incident. Americans have not been herded into camps since World War II, so why worry about it now?
For some, the answer comes in the form of yet another government contract awarded to Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root to build "temporary detention facilities" in case of an "immigration emergency." Reminiscent of Rex 84, which was conducted on the premise of preparing for "an influx of immigrants," there is reason to believe that hoards of poor, tired immigrants are not the true concern. As Tom Hennessy of the Press-Telegram recently pointed out, "there already are thousands of beds in place at various U.S. locations for the purpose of housing illegal immigrants." So what else might these centers be used for?
Given predictions that another terror attack is all but certain, it seems far more likely that the centers would be used for post-911-type detentions of immigrants rather than a sudden deluge. "Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," Daniel Ellsberg remarked. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo." As it turns out, immigrants aren't the only concern. As a news brief in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root. KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department in case of an unexpected influx of immigrants or to house people after a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space, the company said.
Hurricane Katrina gave Americans a glimpse of how a natural disaster scenario might play out. John Brinkerhoff, one of the FEMA officials behind the Reagan-era martial law and internment directives who "planned for the detention of at least 21 million American Negroes in assembly centers or relocation camps" began defending the Pentagon's desire to deploy troops on American streets in 2002, and sure enough, after Hurricane Katrina, Blackwater mercenaries were brought in to police the streets of New Orleans -- as soldiers were instructed to "shoot to kill" looters. Brinkerhoff also told PBS that, "The United States itself is now for the first time since the War of 1812 a theater of war. That means that we should apply, in my view, the same kind of command structure in the United States that we apply in other theaters of war."
Which brings us to the KBR spokesman's final statement regarding
How old? I wanna know if I'm closer to Depends usage than you are. What's the cutoff age for taking daytime classes in college, I mean, the age they call security if they catch you talking to a female student?
I've been watching the digital video scene since 1984. I've watched the dogttraining of the consumer the whole time; the redefinition of "copyright" as "property", the elimination of the free analog 1080i hidef TV signal and the new reign of metered digital "content" protected by hardware. The destruction of the national news networks to be replaced by corporate for-profit newsertainment. The balkanization of the national consciousness by way too many bad voices. TV won't be about education and the old raising of the spirit dreamed of by the PBS network. More like the 19th century than the 21st.
Here's the simple answer about the graphics cards: Hollywood doesn't want PC's to run DVD's. They aren't in a hurry to sync up the hardware. They want "content" (the recording you bought belongs to them, forever) output to hardware they license, which will be multi-thousand dollar entertaiment centers. They know prices will drop, but they also know tech will improve and 4K scan content will eventually be marketable, and so on forever. They want a piece of each new lump of money from hardware, and they want a steady stream of cash from IPTV "rentals".
They want a structure that can respond to rapid technological change by rewriting the rules about who owns the video/audio -- the consumer or them. No matter what changes, even direct video to the optical nerve and audio to a cochlear implant, they want a legal structure that says they own what enters your brain.
They aren't paying attention to PCs 'cause they want the damned things to just go away.
Me? I'm running Windows 2000 SP4 on a NON-DRMed box, and have a nice stack of mobos and other parts that run video just fine without their f-ing approval. I don't have to check in with MS to obtain permission to run my PC. Linux is an option, but I'm fairly sure they'll sue anyone into oblivion who reverse engineers DRM for Linux boxen.
I can see their undoing on the horizon. Eventually we'll be able to fabricate our own PC hardware, on our own mini factory machines. We'll make what we like -- unless they outlaw that as well. I assume they will, but I have hope.
In the very end, we really don't need videogames and hidef video to live a good life.
oh yeah, one other point. Bush has been wiretapping and spying without warrants on EVERYONE for the last couple of years. He claimed at first to be following the FISA laws, then changed his story and then claimed that getting the rubberstamp warrant was too much trouble -- consistently lying in fact, because he doesn't need a warrant immediately. He can retroactively obtain one up to 72 hours after the spying begins.
His new justification? He doesn't have to follow any laws. As CinC, he IS the law.
Let's break it down. He can get warrants after the fact, basically a paperwork operation. He doesn't want to. Why? No warrants mean NO RECORDS OF WHO HE IS SPYING ON. If he had to go to the FISA courts, there'd be a record that could be perused ten years or more down the road. He doesn't want a record.
He's spying on his "enemies". That'd be Michael Moore, the ACLU, DailyKos, select reporters, all the others. We know for a FACT that Bolton, now ambassador to the U.N., was running the spy operation via the NSA listening in on the US National Security Council members in the time leading up to the Iraq invasion in order to get a fix on their efforts to hinder their plans. If they can justify that, they have no problem in spying on their opponents, and they must logically be spying right now.
They probably don't want to run their spy targets past the FISA judges because the judges would see the pattern and deny them the warrants.
Also, unverified news back up by observation: there's blackmail going on. Broad observation: why are key congressmen so bloody quiet under this extreme provocation? Why are news organisations so cowed?
I've heard som grim indications that Rove and company are using this goldmine of info to shut people up. Think about it. Every email you've sent in the clear. Every website, even "Russian schoolgirls in rubber suits", Congressman John Smith and his staff have visited, every phone sex number called, every escort service phone call, all the mistresses -- this, baby, is Total Information Awareness. They can nuke anyone from Internet orbit. Bush famously said he doesn't use email because he doesn't want people to read "his stuff". Duh.
By the way, TIA is now called Topsail.
Apology: I didn't mean for that post to be as cranky as it sounded.
"An example of this is NASA's James Hansen. He speaks out directly to the public and is mobbed by his peers as a result. More power to him."
His peers DID NOT MOB HIM. Bush's fundamentalist political appointees are suppressing scientists all over the spectrum (as you know, of course). On global warming, reproduction, evolutionary biology, space science. Fundamentalist overseers and corporate lobbyists are running the show at all the agencies.
His peers have more to lose than Hansen does. Everyone is just waiting for the Democrats to take back the government so they can breath again.
Of course you can stop.
How do you stop? You turn around, and decelerate at one g for the same amount of time you accelerated. You don't even have to cut the engine and precess the ship; you could skew flip. The ship simply adds a lateral acceleration, and slowly "turns" until the ship is pointing backwards, blasting at one g, decelerating. You have to take the billions-of-miles "loop" into account navigating, but that problem is trivial compared to hitting a hundred-million arrival mile window at 4.75+ light years.
Well, the problem this individual is claiming to address is one that only people who really think about high speed travel come across. Popular "Sci-Fi" doesn't address the problem, so most people haven't even heard about it. It's the interstellar medium. SF proper has discussed it for over sixty years.
(To be fair, sci-fi on TV addressed it once, but only on paper for uber-geeks: the "navigational deflectors" of Roddenberry's starships existed to kick the junk out of their way at sub-c speeds.)
The problem is kinetic energy released when a high speed ship hits something, even an atom. The interstellar medium consists of all the free-floating matter between the stars. The IM holds hundreds to millions of particles per cubic meter. Say the ship is a pencil shape, with a bow area presented of say 2000 sq meters. I'll let people with more time calculate how many particles, from atoms to grains of whatever, the ship will hit per second. Let's just say the energy released would be entertaining to the ghosts of the crew. Of course the ship would hit the IM all the time, from takeoff speeds to top speed, so the problem would be noticed early on in the voyage.
And that's the tiny problem. The big one is REAL objects, from grains of sand to entire planetlets that may exist in the flight cyclinder in front of the ship, sextillions of miles of them. POOF. Plasma. No time to dodge, not at those speeds. And the ship might be required to dodge thousands of times a second. Not good.
For more fun, think of what happens to the wavelengths of the radiation the ship plows through at those speeds as well. Doppler shifts, big ones. We're talking super-high frequency x-ray, enough to melt the metal the ship is made of, I'd guess off my butt. More than enough in any case to kill the crew.
"Look out, Itchy, it's an IRISHMAN!"
Seig Heil.
"Christian" is Fundyspeak for "Southern Baptist Conference, Fundamentalist/Literalist, Born-Again, anti-abortion". Methodists might conceivably make the grade, but occasionally backslide into the pit of Satanism that all the other false Christians occupy. Catholics are of course not Christian, but rarely is it said out loud.
Yep. The SF Bay erotic services are by far the most entertaining of all the cities. Damn you lucky SFers!
"Who the hell's going to argue with that? Seriously?Who the hell's going to argue with that? Seriously?"
Me.
I guess I'm unusual.
Terry Pratchett once observed that cows are herded by men that, if the cows every thought about it, the cows could convert into a damp smear on the ground in two seconds.
But the cows never think about it. They are cows. Rebellion never crosses their minds, so they let the pink monkeys herd them into slaughterhouses.
(plaitive tone) why are we all cows? people died for over a hundred years to create unions so that employers couldn't treat people like peons on a feudal estate. Why do you hate yourselves so much?
You have to love it, Canadian person. Look at the postings on this page; they are siding WITH THE MAYOR against one of their own. That's where our unions are.
I've been immersed in this culture my whole life, and it takes a short shock of outside air to look at it anew. We've a country that hates "socialism" so much that they organize to keep inions OUT of their workplace. The salaries shrink, pensions disppear, healthcare is repeatedly slashed for current employees and denied to new, "temporary" employees who never will become permanent. And they will side with the employers every time.
There's a book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?", which, altho not really being about Kansas, addresses this all-pervasive phenomenon here in the south. Wage slaves vote against their own interests, and those of the families, because of their distaste of "socialism" and "big government".
It's a waterfall to the bottom of the gorge. The center ain't holding, and we're all being flushed, except for the very tippy top of the social scale, which is swimming in money and will pretty much own everything.
Got any room up there for expats? I'm thinking WAY up north, given the warming to come. A place without cameras on every street, a scenario the Mayor of Chicago is bringing to fruition. Our new transit passes will track our movements, we're to be watched at all times, they're reading our email and listening to our phones down here. I didn't waste all that time growing up to live in a prison populated by cowards overseen by the paranoid and greedy.
Every point I made has come out of the news services in the last few weeks. "Michael Moore" didn't tell me this; Halliburton.com told me about the camps, and AP and the newspapers told me the rest. Abu Graib cost 8 million. How many camps are they building with 347 million??
The feeding chairs were in today's news. The prison officials are quite proud of their accomplishment. They seem to really like tying up naked men. Those men are simply trying to die to leave hell. They are being tortured, every day they are in a cage. We've let thousands free from these camps, uncharged, since they hadn't done anything. Fairly good bet we're hosing down innocent men. We've killed about 32 during their various tortures, didja know? It was in the news. Google is your friend. That's the number the military admits to torturing to death.
All you have to do is read. But you don't, do ya. Ya get your news from Limbaugh and the new, "culture-changed" CNN, and of course Fox News and the others.
this isn't "liberalism", this is about morality and truth. It's about not torturing innocent people, about concentration camps being built while CBS and NBC and CNN and Fox don't give a damn.
You are aware that Haliburton recently landed a 347 million dollar contract to build new "emergency detention" facilities in the continental U.S.? They're building prison camps for tens or hundreds of thousands of people. The reason given is "immigration emergencies", or disaster housing.
I don't know exactly how to pound the point home any harder, but they are preparing for national upheaval. They are building concentration camps, my friend, and if anyone tries rebellion they are going to become permanent residents. You're presenting a false choice, letting rebels live or killing them. They've plans to lock them up en masse. Bush already has defacto power to strip citizenship and human rights away at will; locking protestors or armed rebels into Kellogg Root and Brown maintained mass prison camps wouldn't stonker them at all. In case ya'll haven't noticed, crossing SS designated boundaries around public events (I interpret this as leaving the "1st Amendment Zone") is now a federal felony subjecting the criminal to arrest -- by the Secret Service. As a terrorist, essentially.
This isn't a new plan, either. Reagan's people had a contingency plan set up to mass arrest and imprison dissenters back in '84. Our boy Oliver North had a huge hand in the plan. It's amazing how the same names keep popping up.
they have taken on vast unconstitutional powers to capture terrorists. Now, the next step is to redefine "terrorist". They've already designated PETA a terrorist organisation. Peace groups have been infiltrated and monitored since 2001 -- as terrorists, of course. Bush has linked criticism and terrorism already. His posse obviously is following a plan which ends with their party enabled to imprison dissenters without trial, subject to torture at will, or even death. Didja hear Guantanamo has a execution station now?
You can't get near the President anymore unless you sign a loyalty oath and are vetted by the SS for Republicanism. Show up with a sign or a T-Shirt with something to say and you are out, or under arrest. And despite what you might think,the cops are all on board with the President. I saw what happened in Chicago back in 2003. The cops are hard-core Republicans. Same with the military brass (not so much the rank and file). Someone once refered to the Army as the armed forces of the Republican party.
In other news, hunger strikes have nearly disappeared at Guantanamo Bay after they've strapped the hunger strike non-people into "feeding chairs", forced food down tubes, and physically prevented the tortured from throwing up the food. Afterwards they locked them into "cold cells" for punishment. I can only assume they're using the cold water hoses in the 50 degree concrete cells again, to get those prisoners nice and hypothermic and quiet.
I don't feel very ironic anymore. This is very dangerous. they are totally out of control, and there is no mass media that anyone trusts anymore, since news was turned into a "business" instead of a loss leader to keep a broadcast license, to tell us what's happening. We have to read overseas press to find out what's going on in our own country.
Well, you could try being careful, not letting sharp objects touch the screen? Is it their failure if people are absentminded klutzes? How d'ya make a scratchproof video screen, exactly? If you keep rubbing your car key on your plasma display, do ya complain to Toshiba about those ugly scratches?
False choices. Let's go with the unstated third choice: use some of that 90 billion dollars sitting in the bank to rewrite the OS and fix the damned problems, so we no longer need this "fix". OS-X and the various Unixes seem to be working without monthly repair contracts, and Unix itself is older than Windows by far. Microsoft could fix the code -- if it wanted to. They apparently don't want to. This repair contract they are offering is worth even more tens of billions of dollars permanently flowing into their coffers.
More like a restaurant slipping you arsenic with your meal, then selling you the antidote as an add-on dessert as you lay dying on the tiled floor. A MONTHLY antidote, no less, at an ever-increasing price.
"not how you accumulate 40 billion in the bank"
90 billion, and growing fast. You'd think they could spend some of that and fix their code. But, Vista seems to be a Mac-ified XP. Why fix what's making them even more money? They sell the problem AND the fix. You buy the OS, then pay for a monthly repair contract on the unwarrantied junk they sold you.
Bart's second law: Any time a person or entity makes a "mistake" that puts extra money (or power) in their pocket, expect them to make that "mistake" again and again and again.
Have you ever calculated what we in the U.S. have actually paid for internet access in the last twenty years? I don't mean "per month". I mean, draw back, and think.
Let's go for this year. Lemme see. Guess 20 million, figure from nowhere, with broadband. Just at home. Costs 45 a month on average. 45 X 12. 540 a year, for 20 million homes. 10,800,000,000 a year. Just one year. And it's probably a lot higher; please bear with me here. I'm just making a point.
Ten billion, eleven billion. How much for the last twenty, in toto, business and residential, have we paid? Twenty? Thirty? Forty billion bucks? Keep the idea of the magnitude in mind as I add tens of billions in free money granted by federal and state and municipal governments, in tax breaks, in granted monopoly access to customers, in deregulation calulated to permit the telcos to bring fiber to the door.
HOW MUCH HAVE THEY SUCKED US FOR? A hundred billion? How about the lost opportunity costs because we've crap bandwidth for maximum profit?
And now we'll have two-three companies left after all the merging, in an easy-to-maintain price fixing circle.
Let's call it a hundred billion they've charged, with much more to come. And we've got what for connections? For how much each? How much will it take to pound home the point that the way we've gone about it has failed our people, our economy?
It would have been cheaper for the Federal government to have laid fiber to the home in an Apollo type project over the last 20 years. Private businesses are too fast, too well financed, for any sort of meaningful regulation. They pull simple stunts like placing their best lobbyist, Powell, at the head of the FCC under Bush, where he granted them their wettest wishes. He'll of course go back to work for them after he's done and become a squillionaire for his loyal efforts.
Sigh.
and then there's this: http://muniwireless.com/community/1023 Oy.